Book Review : B.R Yeager - Negative Space (2020)
Just being here kills everything.
B.R Yeager’s Negative Space was released on this unsuspecting planet on March 1st 2020 by a little known Philadelphia based publisher called Apocalypse Party. Thirteen days before everything went to shit. It has become the talk of the town since, but I believe this conceptual horror novel is not done colonizing our collective consciousness. This is one of the best novels I’ve read in 2021 and toxoplasmosis for the soul. I mean that in the most complimentary way.
Negative Space tells the story of three teenagers living in the fictional town of Kinsfield, New Hampshire: Jill, Lu and Ahmir. Something is happening and it might very well be the end of the world: their classmates are killing themselves, animals hurl themselves at cars on the highway, acts of random violence go barely noticed, their common friend Tyler might be communicating with higher beings. All our three narrators want is to survive whatever’s coming for them.
B.R Yeager’s Virus of Life
No matter what happens to you, everyone eventually makes you pretend like everything’s back to normal.
The scariest novels aren’t the ones that feature any monsters. They’re the one making you question the fucking fabric of reality. There are no serial killers or vampires in Negative Space. In fact, everything that happens in Kinsfield is so egregiously violent that people just inexplicably live with it. Hangings? Sure, bury your dead and move on. Shootings? Sure, you don’t feel threatened because it wasn’t anyone you knew. Random cop violence? Doesn’t even register.
Not only this is insanely fucked up, but stripping away a character’s recourses to protect themselves is a great way to make everything and nothing scary as fuck. Life itself is attacking the protagonists through their own choices, but through stuff that doesn’t have anything to do with them as well. The way characters disappear tragically or untragically, on the page or off, gives Negative Space this unpredictable aura that you just don’t find in other novels.
There are several scenes of extreme public violence in Negative Space. They each last a couple of pages before seemingly disappearing from the collective consciousness of Kinsfield. They were the truly creepy and efficient part of this novel. It felt like the Jill, Lu and Ahmir were the starting point, the apocalyptical violence was the destination and there was no one left but me to figure out the road that lead them to it.
Good horror usually does this. It barely explains the nature of the threat that hangs over the characters’ head. What made Negative Space GREAT horror is that the threats come from everywhere. They are so many and they hit the characters so often, you can barely gather yourself in between bouts of unexplained violence. It operates under different dramatic standards. You can’t ever read into the events like you normally would, because everything is dying in Kinsfield.
Beyond horror
Time compresses the older you get. Days turn to weeks turn to months turn to seasons turn to years, until your life resides in just one moment expanding forever, where each step and breath fold wrinkles into your face, carving minutes, irreversible wounds between your joints.
Another aspect of Negative Space that makes it stand out in my opinion is its almost kinetic understanding of what it feels like to grow up and live important years of your life in a fucked up place. Because this novel is ultimately a coming-of-age. A grim and humourless one, but a coming-of-age nonetheless. People in places like these (which I knew a thing or two about) have this sense of stillness they’re ferociously protecting: they don’t want anything to ever change.
If a tragedy happening in a town like Kinsfield, people will look the other way and go one with their lives because it threatens the normalcy they love so much. B.R Yeager illustrates this through the protagonists’ relationship to their parents who aren’t really characters of this novel in the conventional sense of the term. They’re just there. They usher platitudes to sweep under the rug the ugliest fucking things without even paying attention. They barely exist.
I love how Yeager made it personal too by using ideas with great symbolic value. For example, the orange extension cord is used by many characters to hang themselves. This is one normal thing that almost every household owns in towns like these. Using such an item in such a distressing way is both a statement that a) this is what people do around these parts and b) The disconnect between kids and parents has been weaponized by reality, which leads me to my theory.
I believe the multiple deaths in Negative Space are, by far and large, symbolic. The teenagers of Kinsfield are breaking their necks in order to break out of this purgatory they’re born in and access a different reality. A different form of freedom. It is not to be taken symbolically WITHIN THE NOVEL. The kids are dying for real in the narrative’s economy. But I believe Negative Space in itself is an allegory for self-destructions (suicide, drugs, body harm) as a way to emancipate yourself.
*
Negative Space is one of the truly great, smart horror novels I’ve had the pleasure to read in my thirty-nine laps around the sun. It was both an emotional journey and a skin-crawling experience. It shows obvious influence from Blake Butler’s monolith 300 000 000, but it is also indebted to Clive Barker and H.P Lovecraft. This novel will make your feel ugly and vulnerable in the best possible way, like someone stared into your soul and looked at every little imperfection.
